October 7 – 11 This week, another LaWONian did us proud: Michelle is in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013! In her latest post she finds biologists fretting over a flock of very tiny — and very endangered — sandpiper chicks. Cameron and cursive are not friends. But that doesn’t mean the end […]
Month: October 2013
Every year, a tiny bird called the spoon-billed sandpiper tours the Asian economic boom. From its breeding grounds in Chukotka, an autonomous region in the Russian Far East, the sandpiper makes a 5,000-mile migration through South Korea, coastal China, and finally to Southeast Asia — including the shores of newly busy Myanmar, where the birds […]
I used to practice my signature everywhere. I wrote on napkins and notebooks, in crayon on restaurant placemats, with a finger in the wet sand. I even remember a grade-school art project in which I wrote my name and its mirror image, and then used the pair to create a creature: the top loops of […]
Ever get the feeling that the whole world’s privy to a joke you just don’t get? That sort of approximates my life in the sprawl of Kinshasa. For the next year or so, my wife Anne-Claire and I will call this notorious behemoth of a failed state home. I couldn’t be happier – to live […]
Regular readers of LWON know that I’m fed up with science denialism among breast cancer advocacy groups like Susan G. Komen for the Cure®. As I write in the Washington Post today, I’m also exasperated with my doctor (one I won’t be going back to). I’ve been reporting on breast cancer and mammography for more […]
I do seem to keep referring to Freeman Dyson, even writing whole posts about him. The reason, I think, is that I want to write a profile of him, even though 1) profiles of him have been done and done and done, the most recent being a full-blown biography; and 2) he’s way above my […]
September 30 – October 4 This week — on the off chance that you haven’t heard — Christie won the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award for last year’s dynamit post about pink ribbon cancer denialism. Cassie sets out to do a story on how Bolivia can have a navy without a […]
“So, this goes…under the bra?” I stare dubiously at the hard plastic bowls. “Yup,” says the 27-year-old Black Irish firefighter who somehow strikes me as unlikely to know, even though it is he who handed them to me in a sealed package upon which he has printed my name. The trouble is I already have […]
